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# Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory
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In contrast, the only afirmation in “whatever” is of communication as such. Another has communicated. This communication in no way obligates me as the recipient of the message. By responding, “whatever,” I have signaled the minimum degree of awareness of communicative being: a message is sent in expectation of a response (after all, I didn’t completely ignore you). “Whatever” asserts no preferences. It neither afirms nor rejects. And it doesn’t expose the subject as a desiring subject to whom something matters.
There is also an afective dimension to “whatever,” an insolence or attitude or provocation that arises out of its function as a nonresponsive response. By acknowledging communication without attending to the content of the message, “whatever” denies the sender the sense that her message has been received because its content remains unaddressed. The sender is challenged, her position as sender undermined. “Whatever” forestalls a communicative exchange even as it adopts communicative form. It refrains from establishing the subject position of the one who responds with “whatever,” and it unsettles the position of the one who initiates the exchange. It’s a glitch in orality.
If communicativity such that it is whatever communicativity tags forms of subjectivity and belonging discernible in contemporary media practices, who and what is likely to benefit? What kinds of political and economic relations are likely to flourish in these new communicative habitats?
Whatever it takes.
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An extensive literature exists documenting the production of national identities through media and communication technologies. Susan Buck-Morss’s Dreamworld and Catastrophe is one of the best contributions to this research. Buck-Morss explores the mass identities of utopian and project-based states such as the United States and the Soviet Union during the twentieth century. She highlights the dreams and fantasies enabled by the movies, the imaginings of collectivity that film incited. For communists and capitalists alike, twentieth-century technological projects were also identity projects. Four components of Buck-Morss’s account are particularly compelling: mass media’s direct addressing of society, the way mass media change the nature of crowds, the spectacular function of mass media, and the compensatory logic of mass media’s organization of space.
First, many have noted the ways mass media address, well, masses. Radio brought leaders’ voices directly into people’s homes, integrating leaders into their intimate spaces. Broadcast television likewise occupied a domestic space as it addressed its audience as personal members of a nation, perhaps imagined like a family (respected newscaster Walter Cronkite was afectionately referred to as “Uncle Walt”). But film in particular, with its large screen and grand scale, organized and spoke to the masses as a collective. The nation as national society is produced through the media address (whether newspaper, radio, television, or film), with no existence as such prior to this address.
Second, in a nuanced reading of the role of film production in the United States and in the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Buck-Morss observes,
Whereas the radio voice allowed mass identification with political leaders, cinema, traveling to towns and villages to meet audiences halfway, represented a moving image of the masses that allowed audiences to recognize themselves. Such mirroring can be important in transforming the accidental crowd (mass-in-itself) into the self-conscious, purposeful crowd (the mass-for-itself), with at least the potential of acting out its own destiny.9
Unlike the moving carnival whose spectators aggregate and disperse, cinema organizes, locates, and seats its spectators. Their attention is directed to a single place, to the screen. The unity of the screen produces out of the disunity of persons a singular audience that can see and recognize itself as a collective: “we” are watching this movie. For the Soviets, the films of Sergei Eisenstein played a particularly powerful role. Eisenstein captured and glorified intense scenes of revolutionary masses, images that became the memories of the October Revolution. Buck-Morss writes:
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The particular characteristics of the screen as a cognitive organ enabled audiences to see the materiality not only of the new collective protagonist, but also of other ideal entities: the unity of the revolutionary people, the idea of international solidarity, the idea of the Soviet Union itself.10
Similarly, in the United States, cinema changed the nature of the crowd by providing an imaginary mass body. In the earlytwentieth-century United States, ethnic groups, religions, political organizations, and racist law worked against the image and goal of a unified political identity. Film countered these forces, ofering massive cinematic bodies as points of singular identification. It was a crucial vehicle for mass assimilation via the production of a common culture and collective experience.11 And, as Buck-Morss emphasizes, the potential power of this new collectivity was enormous, whether as a force of production, consumption, or politics.
Third, Buck-Morss points out the potential for manipulation in cinema. In an argument reminiscent of Guy Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle, she notes how both Hollywood and Soviet cinema “afirmed oficial culture and denied certain bleak realities of social development.”12 The former presented dream versions of commodity consumption. Monumental stars, awesome production numbers (Busby Berkeley) and special efects (King Kong), and luxurious lifestyles captivated Depression-era audiences and attempted to channel their desire toward fantasies of consumption. The latter idealized production. Although Soviet film in the 1920s continued the avant-garde experimentation of the revolutionary period (which was itself heavily influential in the United States) even as it imported Hollywood movies, by the 1930s, socialist realism and the glorification of collective projects was culturally dominant. The chief of Soiuzkino (Soviet Cinema), Boris Shumiatskii, rejected Soviet art cinema as overvaluing formalism and aesthetics. A better model for socialist realism could be found in Hollywood, which employed a factorylike model of artistic production and a realistic style of “joyful spectacles” accessible to the masses.13 One of the most successful Soviet films of this period was Chapaev, an action movie about the defeat of the White Russians in the Civil War that out–cowboy-and-Indianed the Hollywood movies it was modeled on.
Finally, the fourth aspect of Buck-Morss’s discussion of the role of film in the production and imagining of mass national identities important for my argument is the division between public and private spheres. Here the Soviet and U.S.-American cultural imaginaries are inversions of each other: the space that for one was a fantasized site of fulfillment was for the other a site of drudgery. “The forced intimacy of the communal apartment was a particular kind of terror afecting the most banal practices of every day,” Buck-Morss explains. Insofar as public life under Stalinism was itself presented as the location of purpose and fulfillment, “there was no need for retreat into a private domain.”14 Conversely, in the United States, factory work generally appeared as a particularly brutal, humiliating kind of labor. Workers were subjected to control, subjection, the daily constraints and degradations of the assembly line. Rather than a source of fulfillment, industrial work was necessary drudgery. In return, workers received compensation in the form of consumption, enjoying consumer goods in the context of the love and warmth of the nuclear family. Buck-Morss writes, “the ideology of the private home came to bear a tremendous burden, that of legitimating the entire system of industrial capitalism, and nowhere more so than in the United States.”15
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What fantasies, what possibilities, what kinds of subjects, do multiply intersecting and increasingly personalized media and communication technologies stimulate? Diferently put, how might changes from the media constitutive of projects of national utopian imagination lead in the direction of whatever beings? The pleasures of parallels with Buck-Morss’s discussion of film and national mass identities suggest that answers might be found in at least four domains.
First, if mass media addressed society directly, organizing and speaking to masses as collectives, contemporary networked communications have multiple addressees—addressees known and unknown, friends and strangers. Bloggers may write for others who they imagine share their interests, a group of the uninformed they might enlighten, or future versions of themselves. The set of friends who receive my updates on Facebook, my network, are uniquely mine. Each user’s network is diferent, even as they overlap and intersect. Blogs and social networks do not provide broadly shared symbolic identities from which we see ourselves. Blogs don’t address society writ large. They invite singular readers to consider what they have on ofer. Or they just make themselves available to be found by search engines’ crawlers. Unlike mass media’s calling of collectives, publics, and nations into being, blogs don’t unite bloggers and readers. To this extent, they are more like pencils than cinema. They remain specific in their multiplicity.
Second, whereas mass media made crowds visible to themselves as a unity, providing the crowd with an imaginary collective body, networked communication and entertainment makes particularities visible to themselves as particularities. I can tweet my current location, update my friends on my current mood, check what’s trending. With multiply convergent and turbulent media, I don’t have to settle on any one direction or theme. I can live in the momentary. Not only do these multiple, circulating impulses incite in me a kind of permanent indecision or postponement, a lack of commitment—what else is out there?—but the fragmenting, networking thrust of drive turns my particular body, my very face into a montage: a wrinkle here, a bump there, a nose too large, lips too small. Fortunately, I can update my photo at any time—and I can animate it, too! There is no us. There is no me (although I can google myself to see if I turn up). Buck-Morss argues that “Cinema creates an imagined space where a mass body exists that can exist nowhere else.”16 My point is that blogs—standing in for the networked information and entertainment media of communicative capitalism—not only do not create such a space for a mass body but dissolve any sense of it. They dis-place it, producing instead ever-accelerating circuits of images, impulses, fragments, and feelings. Blogs cannot be counted; they resist inclusion into sets or categories. Yes, cinema still exists, and sometimes it lets us feel ourselves as something like an us— and then I can tweet about it. Blog-mapping projects attempt to make multiple disparate blogs appear as a sphere, a collective, as points in a shared space. But the space they map is in the imaginary of the researcher, not in bloggers’ presence to themselves as a collective.
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Third, the cinematic spectacles produced by Hollywood and the Soviet Union in the 1930s generally sought to afirm oficial culture and deny the grimmer aspects of economic and social life. In contrast, blogs persist in a setting of total mediality: anything can be found, said, seen on the Internet. With publicity as the ideology of communicative capitalism, everything can be said; nothing need be denied. Every aspect of contemporary life is reflected upon, criticized, mocked— and then the reflections, criticisms, and mockeries are themselves reflected upon, criticized, mocked … did we go too far? In this setting, nothing is unworthy of comment or commentary. Every aspect of the ordinary and everyday matters to someone—for like a second. Blogs say that whatever happens to me matters—in and of itself. And in this reflexive environment, even the fact that my posts are boring, that the arguments in my little segment of the blogipelago have an intensity far beyond merit, that the escapades of celebrities captured by TMZ are trivial, even all these facts are known and discussed. Most of the time, the repetitive intensities of blog drama are inversions of politics, rapidly circulating diferences and modulations that ensure that nothing changes. Sometimes the intensities accumulate, “punctuated by catastrophic events, which are both creative and destructive.”17 Markets boom and bust; terrorists attack; a children’s book becomes a global sensation. The circuits adjust and recalibrate, capturing the new again in the snares of communicative capitalism.
Fourth, just as the oficial myth of fulfillment through factory labor collapsed with the end of Stalinism (people didn’t have to pretend anymore that it was true; they still had to go to work), the myth of idealized domesticity crumpled in the United States, in part because of the achievements of feminism, in part because the realities of divorce, infidelity, addiction, and abuse made its fantasy impossible to sustain. Television and feminism both made the personal political, erasing the fragile and imaginary boundaries between public and private, a line that made little sense after the rise of the social. In the remnants of the myth of idealized domesticity, ideals of individual freedom and creativity are promoted. Personal satisfaction takes the place of familial duty. Diferently put, family life is supposed to be personally rewarding (rather than a duty or expectation). When family life fails to satisfy, it is examined and diagnosed, ofered remedies and supplements—the family better succeed, because the brutal competition of neoliberalism ofers neither shelter nor respite. Communicative capitalism provides the form and vehicle for the individualized consumption, participation, and creative needs expression of subjects compelled to be personally satisfied.
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Correlative to the erasure of the always-tenuous distinction between the public and private spheres is the dissolution of the boundary between work and play. From the initial electronics boom in the 1970s through the larger shifts associated with personal computers and the Internet, informatization has promised those who work with symbols and ideas increased ease and comfort. Early versions celebrated telecommuting and the paperless ofice. Later versions preyed on fears of being left behind, out of the loop, not as quick as the competition. Consultants urged corporations to restructure work, to encourage creativity and team building, to make work more like play. At the same time, with ever more games and interactions moving online, onto screens, play seemed a little more like work. In the circuits of communicative capitalism, the repetitions of drive suggest work without work (in the forms of work without pay or work that is fun) and play without play (in the forms of play for which one is paid and play for which one pays with enjoyment). This, then, is the setting wherein blogs are not escapes from the drudgery of part of one’s life. They are not fantastic experiments in virtual reality. Rather, blogs instead extend out from, amplify, and reflect on whatever aspect of whatever life.
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The change marked by the end of the Cold War has been tagged the end of ideology, the end of the Keynesian welfare state, the decline of the Fordist model of production, and the beginning of globalization, the information age, the network society, communicative capitalism. In their account of the new formation, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri accentuate the passage from disciplinary society to the society of control. Focusing on the capitalist societies of the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe, they point out how disciplinary logics worked primarily within the institutions of civil society to produce subjects. By the end of the twentieth century, these mediating institutions—the nuclear family, the prison, the school, the union, and the local church—were in crisis. The spaces, logics, practices, and norms previously coalescing into social and economic institutions have broken down and apart. Their eficacy is now indeterminate. In other words, in some instances, the release of an institutional logic from its spatial constraints has given it all the more force; in other instances, the opposite has occurred.
Corresponding to this pervasive dissolution and indeterminacy (which itself necessarily correlates with the economic changes of informatization and the ubiquitous spread of networked communications) is an “indeterminacy of the form of the subjectivities produced.”18 Hardt and Negri argue that the old political subject—the citizen-subject of an autonomous political sphere, the disciplined subject of civil society, the liberal subject willing to vote in public and then return home to his private domesticity—can no longer serve as a presupposition of theory or action. Racial, ethnic, and sexual identifications are similarly less fixed, less stable, less available as determinate subject positions. In their place, we find fluid, hybrid, and mobile subjectivities who are undisciplined, who have not internalized specific norms and constraints, and who can now only be controlled.
Put in psychoanalytic terms, symbolic identity is increasingly meaningless in the society of control. What we have instead are imaginary identities sustained by excessjouissance—that is, by an injunction to enjoy. More specifically, symbolic identity involves the subject’s identification with an ego ideal—that is, with a perspective before whom the subject sees himself and his actions. Imaginary identification refers to the image that the subject adopts of himself. Symbolic identification, we might say, establishes the setting that determines which images appear and how it is that some are more compelling or attractive to us than others. Imaginary identification refers only to my self-image.
In disciplinary society, normative expectations coalesced around determinate social roles. Presuming the gaze of the school, church, family, or state, one could imagine oneself in diferent positions, positions that would either comply with or transgress institutional norms. I can be a conscientious student, faithful believer, dutiful daughter, good citizen. I can also be a delinquent, backsliding, worthless traitor. Even as the images difer, the symbolic identity of the gaze remains the same. In the wake of the decline of symbolic eficiency, the dissolution of disciplinary society, this gaze loses its prior force. We aren’t sure if it’s operative, if others believe it: is the good student a cog, uncreative, thinking inside the box, a goody-two-shoes? Does the Other actually admire and applaud transgression, and, if so, is it then more transgressive not to be transgressive since that’s what the Other wants? Encountering the endless possibilities of contemporary reflexivity, postdisciplinary subjects are propelled to move through a variety of imaginary identities. We imagine ourselves one way, then another, never sure of how we appear because we don’t know before whom we appear.
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Lacking the ability to imagine how we appear to another, how another sees us, we lose the capacity to take the position of another, to see or think from another’s perspective. We can choose any identity, but we lack the grounds for choosing or the sense that an identity, once chosen, entails bonds of obligation.19 Rather than following norms—which ones? How do they know? Who made them the expert?—we cycle through trends, whether these come from fashion, diet advice, or the hope for an anchor in a particular subculture. The society of control places limits on the mobility and fluidity of contemporary hybrid identities, but these limits are not those installed by a master signifier or symbolic law. Subjects experience these limits as either groundless intrusions, irrational barriers to enjoyment, or as hypothetical or instrumental injunctions as means for achieving enjoyment later. Caught in reflexive networks—always another move, another level—we lose the capacity for reflection. Our networks are reflexive so that we don’t have to be.
We are not bloggers. We are not Facebook. The networked interactions of communicative capitalism do not provide symbolic identities, sites from which we see ourselves as loci of collective action. Rather, they provide opportunities for new ways for me to imagine myself, a variety of lifestyles that I can try and try on. This variety and mutability makes my imaginary identity extremely vulnerable— the frames of reference that give it meaning and value are forever shifting; the others who can rupture it might appear at any moment, and their successes, their achievements, their capacities to enjoy call mine into question: I could have had more; I could have really enjoyed. This insecurity is not only psychic; it’s a reasonable response to struggles to persist in global, reflexive financial and information networks. Most of the economic benefits of neoliberal capitalism—of the new economy celebrated by digital media gurus—follow a power-law distribution. A lucky few will get nearly everything. Most will get very little, almost nothing.
Hardt and Negri describe the ungovernable, mobile, and fluid singularities arising in the aftermath of disciplinary subjectivity in terms of an anthropological exodus. Hence, they emphasize that “those who are against” Empire’s exploitation and domination “must also continually attempt to construct a new body and a new life.”20 Communicative capitalism facilitates and incites these attempts, employing ever-innovative upgrades to ensure not just that the attempts continue but that they accelerate. Hardt and Negri acknowledge that the methods of anthropological exodus are the methods of Empire. But they don’t accept that their response is also Empire’s: do more, go further, radicalize, create something new, make tools into prostheses, migrate and mutate into information technologies. They write, “The will to be against really needs a body that is completely incapable of submitting to command.”21 An undisciplined body incapable of submission is a body of immediacy and enjoyment, driven to move from image to image, intensity to intensity. Lacking discipline, how can it resist, how can it form a will at all? Far from constructing something new, such a body forecloses the possibility and hope of self-governance.
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Networked media in the society of control amplify the challenge that post-Fordism poses to collective identity. Yes, they enable people to sign petitions. Yes, they enable people to give money. Yes, they enable people to express their opinions. Yes, Obama had like a million Facebook friends. But these particular motions of clicking and linking do not produce symbolic identities; they are ways that I express myself—just like shopping, checking my friends’ updates, or following tabloid news at TMZ.com. I may imagine others like me, a virtual local, but this local remains one of those like me, my link list or followers, those who fit my demographic profile, my user habits. I don’t have to posit a collective of others, others with whom I might need to cooperate or struggle, to whom I might be obliged, others who might place demands on me. The instant connection of networked association allows me to move on as soon as I am a little uncomfortable, a little put out. Petitions, social network groups (the one on Facebook that aims to get a million people to say they oppose capitalism has 24,672 members), blogs—they are the political equivalent of just-in-time production, quick responses circulating as contributions to the flows of communicative capitalism. In her compelling analysis of flash mobs, Cayley Sorochan takes the argument even further. Countering enthusiastic appropriations of flash mobs as new instances of democratic engagement, Sorochan presents them as instances of the “fetishizing of pure participation removed from any meaningful political project.” She concludes, “Hopes that flash mobs might represent a future form of political organization reflect a desire for a politics of convenience where getting together with others is easy and does not involve conflict, commitment and struggle.”22 In the circuits of communicative capitalism, convenience trumps commitment.
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